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Monday, February 26, 2007

Since Marco Island is Planning Injection Wells ...

EPA to Permit Florida to Pollute Drinking Water Supplies

By Donald Sutherland

Before EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman resigned from her office she had decided to sign off on a rule-making decision drawn up by EPA water administrators declaring Florida exempt from certain provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Published in the Federal Register on May 5, 2003, the exemption will permit Florida to legally pollute drinking water aquifers with inadequately treated waste through municipal underground injection control (UIC) wells.

The problem the EPA administrators were and are still reviewing arose when the federal agency advised the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) in the late seventies to initiate a program of disposal of municipal sewage and industrial waste by injection underground via deep injection wells.

A Fortune 500 engineering consulting firm, CH2M Hill, had assured all parties the deeply injected underground waste effluent would be contained by a geological barrier and not commingle with drinking water aquifers.

The injected sewage and industrial waste would also harmlessly be disposed of in deep saline aquifers and then migrate into coastal waters.

Government officials admit these events are occurring where sewage waste injected into Florida's underground sources of drinking water (USDW) is migrating into coastal waters.

Federal and state governments have secured no funding to study the health implications of the nation's largest violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the environmental impact of municipal UIC waste migration into coastal waters.

Florida's building, housing, and construction industries endorse the continuation of a sewage disposal process that is less expensive than building advanced wastewater treatment plants with treated effluent reuse facilities.

Communities and residents of most of south Florida's counties have not repealed the expansion of municipal injection wells and have not expressed a health concern with the practice.

Only Pinellas County has decided to plug failed UIC wells and replace them with an extensive wastewater reuse program.

All of Florida's government representatives, officials, and agencies have endorsed south Florida's loosely permitted UIC disposal.

Although two Democratic state legislators this year proposed legislation to have a stricter accounting of UIC permitting, the proposal failed to be considered.

All this, even though Florida's UIC municipal waste disposal program is banned in other states because it is viewed as a health and environmental threat.

"There is no short term solution to the municipal Class 1 UIC fluid migration into underground sources of drinking water (USDW) in Florida," says Nancy H. Marsh, program manager for EPA Region 4 Ground Water UIC section.

"Municipalities are reliant on these injection wells and they can't be shut down," she says.

"The Sierra Club's Florida Chapter has been rebuffed by the state in a call for transparency of the state's underground injection control program that would enhance the public right to know," says Alan Farago, the organization's Miami Conservation Chair.

"Governor Bush and FDEP Secretary Struhs failed to support a proposal which sought simply to account for the massive pollution of underground aquifers in Florida," he says.

So far there are no lawsuits being brought against the EPA, FDEP, or any local utility authority.

A regional EPA official who walked out of the DC headquarters rule reversal sessions on Florida's UIC program says, "The big question is, is the EPA violating the federal law National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) with this action?"

NEPA requires all federal agencies to integrate environmental values in their rule-making processes which consider environmental impacts of their proposed actions and give reasonable alternatives to those actions. The act also mandates a detailed Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for these rule-making processes.

A bigger question according to the same EPA regional official is what is the legal precedent set by this EPA rule change of the Safe Drinking Water Act to accommodate a state's noncompliance with a national law to safeguard the public and the environment.

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